Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

The EIZO Company of Japan is a relatively obscure manufacturer of x-ray monitors and medical imaging displays, but thanks to the work of the Butter Advertising Agency in Berlin/Duesseldorf, Germany, the company is grabbing attention with a new promotional pinup calendar that shows everything -- and we mean everything. X-ray images of nude models posted on the Internet caused a viral storm of commenting and link-sharing.

Viral emails have emerged as a form of stealth propaganda recently, most noticeably in the recent U.S. presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was dogged with false claims that he was a Muslim, that he was refused to salute the American flag, that he was not a U.S. citizen and so forth. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, attempted to trace the chain of one of those emails and found what the Washington Post called "valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age." She noted that the anonymous nature of viral emails, combined with the word-of-mouth way that they spread, makes them hard to counter. "This kind of misinformation campaign short-circuits judgment," she said. "It also aggressively disregards the fundamental principle of free societies that one be able to debate one's accusers."

There were long lines of people in Poland to buy the new iPhone 3G, just like in the U.S. But in Poland, those lined up were paid actors. The Polish subsidiary of the French firm France Telecom (Orange) admitted that they had staged the popular demand for the new device. "It was a marketing stunt," said Wojciech Jabczynski, the spokesperson for the French company.

The Corn Refiners Association launched an 18-month, $20 to $30 million public relations and advertising campaign "to convince consumers that HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] isn't the evil it has been made out to be." The industry group is running ads in major newspapers -- under the banner "time for a little food for thought" -- that say HFCS has the "same natural sweeteners as table sugar and honey." The campaign, which was created by the

The Hotrodders.com website has launched a satirical spinoff, SpankMyMarketer.com, aimed at exposing "illegal stealth marketing" on behalf of companies including General Motors, Holley, Comp Cams and Dynomax, which they say has been posted on theirs and other auto-related websites.

PR Week has more on McDonald's "moms' quality correspondence" PR campaign. The fast food giant met with the six mothers in early June, "at the company's global headquarters in Oak Brook, IL. Future interactions will include a visit to a beef supplier in August and a 'farm field' and produce supplier in September. ...